Simulacrum #15: ‘translating translating apollinaire’ by Gary Barwin

The title translating translating apollinaire should be a little bit too familiar. Of course, bpNichol published his translation experiments, focusing on a single poem of Guillaume Apollinaire, with just this title in 1979. In fact, bpNichol’s first published poem was titled Translating Apollinaire.
Gary Barwin is one of those people lucky enough to have had the opportunity to study under Nichol. It is no surprise then that Barwin has, without masking it in any way, continued Nichol’s project of translating Apollinaire, a project which Nichol himself said was “an open-ended, probably unpublishable in its entirety, piece“. This seems about right. It is as if the concept in and of itself is a seed to an infinite number of books. Here is one of them–a great one.